Kathy Rose

I had a strong negative reaction to Kathy Rose's work.I felt that aside from her very early hand-drawn animation work, the work since then was immature, and technically poor.

The lecture underscored an issue I find often in the arts, when technical ability takes a back seat in the name of expression or concept. Except that in this case, the technical ability seemed stagnant, with almost no change in a body of work that spanned more than twenty years. The elements Rose used to build her video collages were used over and over again, not changing much over 20 years, growing stale over the course of the presentation, like bad clip art used on every design by a cheap design firm.

One one of the pieces had a musical score that wasn't awful, but it turned out her friend had made it, and Rose was just using the musical track in her video piece.

I tend to cringe when I see an artist of a certain racial/national/cultural background take a deep interest in and produce work that strongly references influence of another race/nationality/culture. Rose had visited Japan, and was strongly affected by her visit, including many Japanese icons and references in her work. I feel that this undermines the work, and while it's a wonderful thing to be inspired by a different culture, by a foreign experience, including references to that experience is such a slippery slope. Rose's efforts came across as that of a tourist who visited once or twice, and then returns to spout off horribly mispronounced, ill-used greetings at the local sushi shop, while the sushi chefs grit their teeth and politely smile.

I want to see Rose take some time off from the digital aspect of her work, return to using her hands to create marks, and returning to herself, to create work that springs from herself, as opposed to from her influences. In the mean time, perhaps she could look into deepening her knowledge and understanding of those influences, allowing her to incorporate them into her processes with sensitivity.